


Driftwood

by Secret Staircase (elwing_alcyone)



Category: Zero: Tsukihami no Kamen | Fatal Frame IV: Mask of the Lunar Eclipse
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Implied Relationships, Unreliable Narrator
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-22
Updated: 2018-06-22
Packaged: 2019-05-26 23:30:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15011771
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elwing_alcyone/pseuds/Secret%20Staircase
Summary: Choushiro is determined to uncover the truth about Rougetsu Island, but it's harder than he expects.





	Driftwood

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the BCL Christmas Exchange 2017. The recip liked Lovecraftian stuff so I aimed for something in that vein, but think more "The Night Ocean" than "The Call of Cthulhu".

_1970_

"Rougetsu Island," Suzuki muttered. He swigged his coffee as if to wash away a bad taste. "Someone must not like you."

"You think?" Choushiro said. No one had assigned him to go to the island; it was his own hunch he was following. But he was more interested in hearing what Suzuki had to say than correcting him. "What aren't they telling me?"

"Just that you'll be wasting your time. I've been there once or twice. There was this one case; must have been ten years ago. Some kids were messing about in a sea cave, two of them got stuck, the tide came in and that was that. It was straightforward enough. Kids do things like that, don't they? It's sad, but you see it all the time."

"So what happened?"

"I'm just saying, it's not like we were investigating a murder. We just wanted something to put in the report, so it didn't look like we'd ignored it. But the people... there's something not right about them. They clammed up. We were looking at an accident and they were treating it like a cover-up. If you didn't know better you'd think they really were hiding something, but that's how they are. They don't talk to outsiders."

He finished his coffee and wiped drops from his moustache. The story seemed to be over, but Choushiro waited a moment more, looking idly through the Haibara file.

"That place," Suzuki said. "That cave. I didn't like it."

"No?" Some of the older detectives wouldn't talk about their cases to someone as young as Choushiro. Others were glad to have someone to talk to who hadn't been there. If you looked respectful and didn't pester, they could tell you a lot.

"The island's full of caves, you know. They say you can walk from one side to the other underground, if you know the way. Anyway, this place. It had carvings on the wall, rock carvings. They were weird. They didn't look like anything. Their religion doesn't make much sense to me. Supposed to be moon-worship, but how do you worship the moon from inside a cave?"

He pulled out his pack of cigarettes and started tapping it against the desk. Choushiro waited, keeping his expression attentive but not too obviously interested. _I'm listening,_ the look said, _because it's you telling me, not because I want to know that badly, not because I'm going to repeat any of it._

"I asked around about the rock carvings," Suzuki said. "Everyone was, you know, 'oh, they're just old pictures, nobody remembers what they're for.' Well, the tide comes into those caves twice a day. If someone wasn't going to the trouble of preserving those old pictures, they would have been worn away to nothing by now."

"I see what you mean."

"Not saying it had anything to do with the kids dying, you understand. But it's a weird place, and if it's that hard to get to the bottom of a simple accident... I'm just saying, don't get your expectations too high for the Haibara case."

Choushiro nodded as if he understood. Truthfully he had no intention of giving up on his case before it had begun, but there was no need to offend Suzuki.

Suzuki got up, passing his pack of cigarettes restlessly from hand to hand. "Going for a smoke. When do you head out?"

"Tomorrow morning."

"Well, just be careful what stones you turn over. Good luck, Kirishima."

* * *

Choushiro's first impression was that Suzuki had been wrong about the islanders. They seemed happy to talk, even when he told them who he was and what he was looking for. Everyone was busy, either preparing for the festival the next day or looking after relatives who'd come back from the mainland to participate in the island's great event, but nobody acted as if they had anything to hide. They hadn't seen Haibara, or so they said, and Choushiro's gut said they were telling the truth.

He spent his first day getting his bearings, regularly consulting the tourist map he'd picked up at the ferry port. He strolled past Haibara Hospital and its adjoining sanatorium, Rougetsu Hall, without trying to get inside. He walked past the small museum, which was crammed with tourists, and had lunch in a cafe on the cliffs, which commanded a view of the lighthouse and the rest of the archipelago, chains of small islands floating in the mist. Everywhere he went he showed people Haibara's photo, but he never saw so much as a guilty look.

Finally, perhaps remembering Suzuki's story, he found a path that led down to the beach and followed the line of the coast, looking speculatively at the sea-caves as he passed. If they went as deep as people said, they might make a good hideout, but he couldn't imagine Haibara camping in some damp cavern under the island. No, if he was anywhere he'd be with his father. Choushiro would need to speak to the patriarch at some point, but that was where things might get delicate, and he wanted to gather as much information as he could without blundering into any unseen tripwires.

The sun was sinking, shining in his eyes as he started back along the beach. Some people might have called it strange that none of the tourists seemed to want to come down here to the water's edge, but the beaches were stone and shingle, not sand, and maybe they'd been warned about the dangers of the tide and were playing it safe. Either way, he had it all to himself.

There was something moving in the surf. He shaded his eyes, trying to tell what it was. A dark shape, rolling and flopping in the waves. He told himself it was probably a seal, or some kind of trash, but his mind turned first to the boys who'd drowned in the sea-caves. That was when the thing rolled over, and he clearly saw its face. He saw that it was a woman, her eyes scooped out, her lips eaten by the crabs, her dark hair coiling in the water. He saw her.

Then he saw that what he'd taken for a face was an old, sea-worn wooden mask. The mask looked cheap and plain, the kind they were selling everywhere the tourists congregated. It was caught up in a bundle of black seaweed, and that had been her twisting hair and sodden clothes.

Later on he'd be able to laugh at his moment of foolishness, and how he'd let Suzuki's talk get to him. Now he picked up the mask, pulling it free from the ribbons of seaweed. He wanted to bury it somewhere higher up the beach, but when he turned he saw the entrance to a cave behind him, a crack running halfway up the face of the cliff. He had no way of knowing it was the cave where the kids from Suzuki's case had drowned, but it felt right.

_It had carvings on the wall, rock carvings. They didn't look like anything._

Choushiro was tempted to go in and take a look. But the next wave came higher than the last, splashing his heels, and convinced him not to risk it. He kept walking.

It was dusk when he finally made it back to the hotel, and he'd nearly missed dinner. He stopped at reception just long enough to pick up his room key. The old woman who worked there smiled and said, "Are you attending the kagura too?"

"Hm?"

"I don't know why it surprises me, when it's the only reason anyone comes here," she said cheerfully. "But I don't know why it would be so interesting to an outsider. I'm sure there are better festivals on the mainland, and you can drink there!"

Choushiro smiled and assured her he was looking forward to it. He assumed she had this conversation with all her guests as the eclipse drew near. It was only when she handed over his key that he realised what had prompted her question: he was still holding the mask he'd picked up from the shore.

* * *

He dreamed he woke in the courtyard of Haibara Hospital, with the moon shining down. Haibara was there, smirking and just out of reach. Choushiro had the oddest feeling that more time had passed, that the case had progressed beyond just a manhunt. He had to go to the basement of the hospital. Someone was there, waiting to be found.

He stood up and his foot struck something that clattered away. It was a driftwood mask, as old as the sea. From one angle it looked like the face of the moon. From another it didn't look like a human face at all.

He started to lift it, to put it on.

Someone said -

* * *

The island was still in uproar, after the tragedy at the festival. Crowds of tourists milled around, hoping to catch an early ferry away from a place that suddenly seemed like bad luck. You could tell the mainlanders by their looks of vague anxiety. The natives just looked stunned. Choushiro had seen that look in the eyes of the bereaved. It was more than just the deaths of the performers. Economically and spiritually, the kagura was the foundation the island was built on, and it had cracked beneath them.

"It's like that time before," someone muttered, in Choushiro's hearing. "That day - "

"Shh!"

Everyone seemed to be out on the streets; no one wanted to be cut off from the news. Choushiro went too and wandered up and down what passed for a high street here: a handful of shops selling essentials, a tiny library, the museum he'd glanced into yesterday, and a restaurant mostly aimed at tourists. He went in the hope that he'd hear something useful, but also to shake off the cold gloom that had been hanging over him since he had visited the morgue last night. He'd seen bodies before, visited morgues before, but there had been something profoundly unsettling about that place. The woman lying there, stripped of her dancer's clothes, still and cold. Her face...

Someone on the street caught his eye. She was moving in the same direction as the tourists making for the ferry port, but set apart from them. She was wearing a kimono, for one thing, and she wore it like everyday clothing, without any of the self-consciousness of the people who only wore them to dress up on special occasions. She was clearly an islander; she looked exhausted, and on the verge of tears. Choushiro was sure he recognised her from somewhere. Had she been at the kagura last night? He felt as if he'd stood just here many times before, watching her walk towards him.

He was so caught up in the idea that it took him a moment to realise she really was coming towards _him_ , that he was her destination. Her eyes were fixed on his face.

"You're Mr. Kirishima, aren't you?" she said. "They told me you were a detective."

"That's right," he replied, distracted by a powerful feeling of deja-vu. He was sure he knew her voice - the way she said his name was exquisitely familiar. "Can I help you?"

"Perhaps. May I talk to you somewhere less crowded?"

They chose the museum. Yesterday it had been full of people; now it was deserted. Choushiro and the woman walked unseeing past exhibits in glass cases, masks and wooden carvings, pottery shards and rusted swords, musical instruments carved from single pieces of wood, photographs and paintings showing the history of the island. Her name was Sayaka Yomotsuki.

"I understand there's a great deal going on," she said. She was soft-spoken and precise, as if every sentence were planned and rehearsed before she said it. "The tragedy at the Kagura naturally captured everyone's attention, so you might not have heard about the disappearances last night."

"Disappearances?" Choushiro said, completely thrown. No one had said anything to him.

"My daughter is missing. She's seven years old. She was a patient at the hospital. She disappeared during the Kagura and nobody has seen her since. And she's not the only one. I know of two more girls who vanished. I believe there may be others."

Choushiro shook his head as if to clear it. Hadn't there been something like this in his dream? Missing girls waiting to be found... but it slipped away. What surfaced instead was the memory of the sea-caves, and the two boys who'd died there ten years ago.

They had stopped in front of a display case. _Death masks carved from driftwood, believed to date from the Jomon Period. Found preserved in natural tombs in the Rougetsu Tunnels._

"I have no one else to turn to," Sayaka said, her voice plain and matter-of-fact. "Will you help me?"

_Flute carved from bone, circa Jomon Period. Found along with death masks and other grave goods in Rougetsu Tunnels. When found, the site was undisturbed, but the body of the flute appeared to have been deliberately filled with sand, perhaps to prevent it being played._

The image of a woman's body, rolled in the surf. Another, lying chill and silent in the morgue. Two boys, drowned beneath ancient rock carvings.

Sayaka's eyes turned up to his, afraid to hope.

"Don't worry," he said. "I'll find her."

* * *

He woke up in the courtyard. Now there was no moon in the sky, and that troubled him. How could Haibara appear without the moon?

There came the sound of a flute, piercing and otherworldly. When he had been removing the covering from Tsubaki Tono's face, someone had been cleaning the sand from it, grain by grain.

The hospital rose above him like a cliff face, and the entrance was the mouth of a cave. The music was coming from inside.

"How can you worship the moon from inside a cave?" he asked.

Sayaka said, "The tide comes in. The moon and the sea are always in conversation. All the oldest shrines are underwater now."

"I want to see the carvings," Choushiro said. "Will you tell me what they mean?"

"Nobody remembers," she answered. "They were made to be forgotten."

* * *

It was starting to get to him. The island. There was something in the air, in the stillness. He hadn't noticed it before, when the place had been crawling with outsiders, but now it had gone quiet again, and it was like an office after hours when the building empties out, and suddenly you can hear the hum of the air conditioning, the tick of the clock. At night he dreamed he could hear the sea creeping through hidden caves beneath the island.

He found his mind wandering more. Ideas would catch him off-guard. Listening to his investigation tapes, he noticed more incomplete sentences, more pauses, sections that seemed half finished. He noticed himself clicking the record button and forgetting what he meant to say. Sometimes he went rambling off on tangents that had nothing to do with the case. Like Sayaka. He recorded over those.

The old woman who ran the hotel knocked on his door one evening. He had a phone call at reception. It was HQ, asking how long he intended to stay there. Other cases were piling up, and there was no evidence of a crime. All the missing girls had been suffering from that, whatsit, Getsuyuu Syndrome, wasn't that right? They'd probably wandered off and drowned. No one had seen Haibara. It was time to come home.

He managed to negotiate himself a few more days. After that, there was nothing to be done. "Like you say," he said, closing his eyes. Sayaka's weary face turned to him from the darkness. "They're probably dead by now anyway."

* * *

In Rougetsu Hall he stood in a windowless room, looking down at a painting of a woman in red that almost seemed to glow. The kid had said there was a girl up here, but the patients got confused. They ascribed their emotions to inanimate objects, like children; they didn't differentiate much between people and representations of people. Like paintings, or dolls.

Magaki had painted it directly onto the floorboards. This would never be put in his gallery, or transported away. It would stay part of this room. Like rock carvings, hidden in the depths of a cave.

Above that, the isolation ward. You had to follow a long corridor to reach it, all the way around the building. Far from everything. On a clear day you would be able to see for miles out of the greenhouse windows, but when he looked everything was lost in the haze.

No sign of Haibara. No sign of Ruka. Only a few more days before headquarters called him back.

Sayaka met him on his way out. He didn't have to say anything; her hopeful expression faded as he walked towards her.

"I was sure someone there would know something," she said. "Did you talk to the nurses?"

"It's all right. There are other leads. I'll keep looking," he said. It was all he could bring himself to say.

* * *

He and Sayaka were walking along the beach. There was a strong, warm wind from the sea, tugging strands of hair loose from her normally neat bun, and although it was for the investigation, he was conscious of how it might look if someone saw the two of them walking alone together, now she was no longer living with her husband.

He was telling her about his first walk along this shore, how he'd seen a mask and a clump of seaweed and mistaken it for a corpse. He thought it would reassure her, somehow, but she only shuddered and turned away.

"This is where I saw it," he said. "This is the cave. Think you can get me in?"

She only looked troubled. Her feet were bare, which for her was an unusual break with formality. Her toes curled around the flat pebbles, and he wondered if the broken bits of shell and stone were hurting her.

"Two boys died here," she said.

"Yes, someone told me that."

"It was You Haibara," she said, as if she expected him to know that already, too. "After his sister became ill, he..."

"What?"

"You didn't know? All that was covered up, of course, but I thought you might have guessed."

Choushiro wanted to take her by the shoulders and make her look at him. "What are you talking about?"

"He got the idea from his father, I suppose," she said in distaste. "He thought it might make her better. A sacrifice, just like the olden days. As if we're no more civilised than that."

Choushiro looked at the cave. In the moonless night it was a jagged black shard like a crack in reality. He felt as if he'd been given all the pieces of a puzzle, but he could only put them together out of order. Haibara and missing children. Could Ruka...?

"She's not in there," Sayaka said. "But you're on the right track." She opened her mouth and the sound of the flute came out, high and painfully clear, making all the hairs on his neck stand up. It sounded like nothing on earth. He fought an urge to cover Sayaka's mouth and stop that song, to pull her out of the foaming waves that ran up the beach and clung to her bare feet.

He woke, confused, to knocking on his door, and for several moments the dream seemed more real than anything else. He couldn't remember if Haibara killing the two boys was something he knew, or something his subconscious was only guessing. He couldn't remember if Sayaka had really walked along the beach with him, with her feet bare and her hair coming loose.

The landlady was at the door. She blinked at his dishevelled appearance; he had overslept. She gave him a letter, and he made his way sleepily back to bed, opening it as he went.

_I am an official at Haibara Hospital,_ he read, and then, _From the well outside the hospital, I heard the echo of a child's voice._

He stared at that line for a long time. And then he scrubbed his face, and read the whole thing, and then he got up to dress.

* * *

He found them in the caves.

They weren't dead, as he'd feared. But there were no answers, after all of it. He led them out, looking over his shoulder and planning on coming back. He'd bring a full investigative team. Whatever the islanders were doing, whatever the Haibaras were doing, he'd get to the bottom of it.

Three days later, the girls were safe at home, and he was off the case. It happened just like that, without any explanation. Choushiro didn't need one. He could imagine Shigeto Haibara, plump and placidly smiling, stepping into the Superintendent's office, taking a seat, laying it out.

At work he found himself biting back anger more than usual. The need to get back to Rougetsu Island was like an itch beneath his skin, the crawling irritation of unanswered questions. He dreamed of the caves, the dead, the tide rolling back and leaving things exposed on the shore, half-seen and wriggling. He dreamed of Ruka Yomotsuki, now Minazuki, looking up at him and giving him one word, _Kiraigou_ , like a key with no door to unlock. He dreamed of You Haibara stepping back into the shadows with a sideways smile, slipping out of reach.

While he tried to find a way to get back, Sayaka was leaving. She was part of the mystery, too, but whatever she knew, she wouldn't tell.

* * *

_1980_

He and Sayaka walked along the beach. There was a time limit, but they went with no particular urgency. Choushiro kept looking down at himself, waiting to see if he would turn translucent now he knew he was dead. He didn't. He looked and felt the same as ever.

"I still don't understand everything," he told Sayaka. He was half hoping she'd explain it all, but she shook her head.

"We all have only pieces," she said. "It goes back too far. So much is lost, so much is forgotten, and that by design."

They had passed the sea-caves, full of the whispering voices of the sea. Now they edged around the coast to where the lighthouse was visible in the distance.

"I never understood it either," Sayaka said. "I thought I did. Souya thought the same, and Shigeto. We all thought we alone had inherited the truth about Rougetsu Island, but we all just had fragments."

"When you caught a glimpse of the rest, you left."

"And when Ruka sees it, she'll leave too, and perhaps that will be the end of it."

Just the tide flowing into the caves, and the moon swinging across the sky month after month, and the long silence.

The lighthouse didn't look like a lighthouse. It didn't look like anything. Squat and ancient, a nameless monument raised to the sky by nameless peoples. Whatever it commemorated, no one now knew. It was a void against the sky, a symbol of forgetfulness.

Then it was a lighthouse again, and for the first time in years, the lantern shone out across the bay. For everything it illuminated, the shadows grew longer and deeper.

"What do we do now?" he asked Sayaka.

"Help Ruka," she said, "and trust that what's needed will be remembered. And then let the rest be forgotten."

* * *

There was a mask at his feet - black wood, smooth and beautiful. There was a dead woman rolled and tossed by the tides, her face eaten away. In the morgue he had drawn back the cloth to see the ruin that lay underneath. Now he covered it over again. In the caves the tide would be washing away the ancient carvings, and so the last sliver of the moon vanished into shadow.

A moment later, he saw the light that had been Sayaka go racing like a star across the sea. He left his questions behind, and followed.


End file.
